Vote with your wallet...and your words...and your actions

It's been a while since I've posted. Life goes on. Or life used to go on. Now I am looking for any possible way to #resist what's happening in this country. In fact, it is hard to know where to start a post in today's atmosphere of threat, fear, insanity. Add your own words of horror and disbelief. But I started this blog because I believe in the political power of the purse, and I still do today. In fact exercising your economic power by voting with your wallet is more important now than ever before.

Voting with your wallet can often be as simple as crossing the street to shop at Y instead of X (while communicating with X to let them know why). Doing good with hardly any effort at all.

Voting with your wallet can sometimes result in a minor inconvenience: "I can do without this anyway," or "I don't buy that very often anyway." Feeling good about doing good by making an insignificant sacrifice (but don't forget the communication piece).

Now here's where the challenge gets a bit more real. Vote with your wallet and stop using one of your "absolute go-to" items or vendors. That's what I did today.  I'm no longer using Amazon. Why? Because they are advertising on Breitbart and other sites I consider unacceptable, hate-mongering, fake-news-purveying lie-spewers. Not only is this a significant inconvenience for me, but it also harms my favorite charity, since I use Smile.amazon and support Pawsitively Cats in the process. So I'll need to spend a bit of extra money when I make my annual donation to the kitties, in addition to having to find multiple places to purchase all that 'stuff.'

But hey - there is an upside as well. Since I no longer have the convenience of logging on to Amazon and finding pretty much everything, I'm making a commitment to try and re-source locally. Hoping to do some good for my community at the same time I make a statement for the condition of this poor, benighted country.

Oh yeah - don't forget the other important piece of voting with your wallet: Letting your vendor/customer know what you are doing and why. So here is the email I sent to Amazon this morning.

Although I am undoubtedly not your largest customer, you can see from my record that I am a regular Amazon shopper. No more...not until you stop advertising with hate-mongers like Breitbart. 
Mr. Bezos made an eloquent statement to his employees about diversity and inclusion. Now he needs to back it up by pulling his name from those who so obviously oppose those values.
I look forward to the time when I can return to doing business with Amazon, but until then I am your sad-to-go-ex-customer,

Stephanie Bader

Vote with your wallet!